Spree on Heroku

This is an extension for Spree, allowing the e-commerce system to run on Heroku - http://heroku.com.

The major constraint on Heroku is that we can't write files to disk, so this extension disables all disk caching, fixes a few issues and changes Spree to store on Amazon S3.

Requirements

A Heroku account and an Amazon S3 account with a bucket.

Installation and configuration

Make a Spree application:

spree myapp

Install this extension:

cd myapp
script/extension install git://github.com/RSpace/spree-heroku.git

Copy the .gems manifest to the root of your application:

cp vendor/extensions/heroku/.gems ./

Create a Heroku application and deploy it:

git init
git add .
git commit -m 'Initial create'
heroku create myapp
git push heroku master

Enable SSL, since Spree uses SSL for administration and payment flow in its standard setup:

heroku addons:add "Piggyback SSL"

Bootstrap the database locally (not possible in Heroku, because the rake task attempts to copy files), and transfer it to Heroku:

rake db:bootstrap
heroku db:push

Please note that if you choose to load sample data, images will be missing for all products. Spree's bootstrap task copies the images locally, but it doesn't put them on S3, where this extension configures Spree to look for images.

Configure the extension with your S3 information and restart the application on Heroku:

heroku console
>> Spree::Heroku::Config.set(:bucket => 'bucket name')
>> Spree::Heroku::Config.set(:access_key_id => 'access key')
>> Spree::Heroku::Config.set(:secret_access_key => 'secret access key')
>> exit
heroku restart

That's it - you're done! :)

Troubleshooting

This extension has been tested with Spree 0.9.1. If you have problems using the extension with a newer version of Spree, it could be due to Spree's gem dependencies having changed. The gems in the heroku .gems manifest must mach the gems and versions required by Spree. This page shows the current dependencies of the newest version of Spree: http://gemcutter.org/gems/spree

Thanks to

Mooktakim Ahmed for creating the HerokuSassAndCache plugin, which is bundled with this extension.

Copyright and license

Copyright (c) 2009 Casper Fabricius, released under the MIT license